Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

Mostly, though, I missed my friend, Amelia Gardner. From her mother, I’d asked for and received several nice photographs of her. In my little house, I’d tacked the photos on the wall at eye level, so I could look into her eyes when I felt the need. It was the only way I knew to try to blot out the way her face looked the last time I saw her. I wanted to replace that sad, small image with the face of the person I knew and loved.

Sometimes, it worked.

I know enough about mental illness to have realized I wasn’t doing well, or behaving normally. All people have emotional boundaries, limits beyond which there is no return. I was on the very outer fringes of mine. I recognized in myself certain troubling symptoms of depression-a malady to which I’ve never been prone. So, early on upon my return, I paid a visit to Dr. Dieter Rasmussen aboard his forty-six-foot Grand Banks and asked of him a favor.

In his heavy, German accent, he replied, “Yah! Of course, I will treat you. Doctor-patient confidentiality. I am a psychiatrist and a scientist. You haf my word!”

I didn’t tell him everything, of course. But I did discuss my symptoms and my strange inability to cry.

After seven visits, I found his diagnosis amusing but not surprising. “You, my friend, will never be an entirely happy man because you are a rational man. In you, and people like you, intellect and spirituality will always be in conflict. My advice as your physician? Find a new good woman and make love to her. Drink more, laugh more, show your friends that you care. Concentrate on some of the many good things that have been happening lately! Remember what I’ve learned in all my years of practice: Freudian psychiatry is absolute bullshit. We are chemical, genetic creatures, but we still have the option of choosing our own direction.”

So, wanting badly to follow his advice, I made a choice. Some good things had happened, and I decided I would focus my attention on them.

The return of a transformed Janet Mueller had had a healthy, happy impact on the whole marina family, as well as on more than a few individuals. The teenage boy she was in the process of adopting, Ron Collins, was among them. So, surprisingly, was my cousin, Ransom Gatrell. Ransom and Janet had both lost children in earlier years, and the two of them had become the closest of friends and confidants. Grace Walker-a truly gorgeous woman-had been included in their sisterly triad. In the three of them, I now saw a peace, and a sense of self-security, that I envied but that also pleased me greatly.

It was more surprising that Jeth Nicholes had not benefited in a way that most of us at the marina had expected. Oh, he was happy to see that Janet was back home, healthy and alive, but a curious thing had happened in her absence. He and Janet’s sister, Claudia Kohlerberg, had fallen quickly, passionately, and devotedly in love. When he tried to tell Janet what had happened, he stuttered so badly that Claudia had had to interpret.

Only Janet’s great gift for understanding, and her new strength, saved what could have become an ugly, community-damaging situation.

She’d actually laughed as she told me, “Irony, Doc. Irony and love. Those are the only two things that separate us from the beasts.”

Another good thing was Tomlinson-who was still Tomlinson, thank God. He continued to demonstrate his universal quirkiness, which is to say, he never followed the path that those of us who know him expect. The most recent example was that, while I was away, he hired an attorney, started a small corporation, and embraced-of all the strange disciplines available-the American free-enterprise system.

He was fascinated by chili peppers and had grown them for years. First, in pots aboard the No Mas. Then whole lots of them on land he leased near Periwinkle Boulevard. A natural extension of that passion was bottling and selling his own hot sauce. He said he had his sights set on a small catalogue company: sarongs from Indonesia, hammocks from Panama, things like that.

“The stuff I love,” he told me, “from the places I’ve been and still miss.”

Tomlinson also continued to demonstrate his kindness and his loyalty to our strange friendship by his concern for my mental health, his careful inquiries, his thoughtful gestures.

One night, sitting with a beer on my deck, looking out over the black rim of mangroves, he said, in reference to nothing that I’d mentioned (perhaps it was in reply to my long, moody silence): “Marion, the world would be a far worse place without you. Please don’t doubt that. Not nearly so generous, and a hell of a lot duller.”

A few days later, we both chuckled over another of his thoughtful gestures. It was a copy of People magazine with a story and photos about a new feud between Gunnar Camphill and his pointed-faced former agent, Lester West-the guy I’d lobbed into the water. Camphill was suing West for spreading “slanderous lies” about the film star being bested in a fight by a hick fishing guide who resembled the star of Gilligan’s Island. In reply, West had provided the magazine with a photo showing Camphill with two black eyes and a bandage over his nose.

“Two adolescents,” Tomlinson said. “Immature spirits always behave this way.”

Now there was this additional good thing: The government was not going to close our marina after all. As a biologist, my immediate concern, though, was that this mandated review of “fradulent” manatee data was, itself, based on greed, not science. There are now, without fail, parties on both sides of environmental issues who seldom hesitate to pervert science to advance their own cause, increase their own power.

But then I was much reassured when I read the name of the scientist whose work was most often cited: Frieda Matthews, one of Florida’s best biologists and field researchers.

So maybe we’d get to keep our home after all.

Mack was right. That was a pretty good reason to celebrate.

Which is why, on this late Friday afternoon, St. Patrick’s Day, I returned from the marina after spending a couple of very rugged hours helping Mack and Felix, Jeth and the other guides lug kegs of beer and platters of food and set up tables, decorations, a limbo pit, and a PA system for the bands-getting ready for the all-night party to come.

I was sweaty, dirty, and more than ready for a hot shower and my first cold beer of the day-which is why, as I hurried down my wobbly boardwalk, I was so pleased to see the girl standing on the upper porch of my house, frosted mug in hand, smiling.

She was another of the new and unexpected good things that had happened recently, and who had helped bring the occasional little smile to my face.

I listened to her call out to me, “So is this the way civilized people are expected to behave? Drink waiting. House cleaned. All your files, nice and neat. Anything else I can do for you, sir?”

I took the beer from her, nodding while wagging my finger, “You are learning, young lady. That is why you’re here-to learn. Don’t forget it.”

She followed me through the door, telling me about her day, all that she had done, all that she had accomplished. The paper she’d written, the math problems she’d solved. Proud of herself, and with good reason.

In the lab, she said, “Oh yeah, and when I was dusting, this thing fell off the wall. Like it was already broke, just hanging there. What is it, like a security camera? I didn’t know what to do with it.”

As I sat at the stainless-steel dissecting table, she placed in front of me the little digital camera that Bernie Yeager had sent. I’d forgotten all about the damn thing. During my many weeks in Colombia, all of my stone crabs and calico crabs had died, and all of my octopi had disappeared. Right along with most of my fish and two of my biggest sharks.